Re: Can't take skilled talent?

Pavel Mencik wrote:
Using the patch can be considered cheating, or at the very
least playing an easier version of the game than everyone else has.
And TB has personally disapproved of it and other similar patches.
Whilst I certainly understand why people would use it, it shouldn't be
suggested to someone new without letting them know the full
implications.

Yes, this has been discussed to death. The patch is available, and it
changes the game to be a bit more like I think it was meant to be, based on
gameplay in previous versions and obvious bugs found in the code.

The game is perfectly playable without it (Don't take the skilled talent.
Run away from jackals, they are more dangerous than dragons.), and I wouldn't
mind changing or removing the patch if TB emailed me about it.


Just my opinion
-fixing skilled bug is good
-fixing artifacts is nice
-disabling berserking is ok, since it is buggy
-"fixing" uberjackal effect is wrong, however. This is not a bug, but a
feature, and not a buggy one. IMO this feature brings a new dimension into
the game, which is always good
-what i would expect from the patch as well, is to provide the 180, 270, and
360 day limits how they are intended. Now that would make victory a bit
thougher, without affecting gameplay in the early and mid game stages.

The skilled talent bug is a simple fix and should not be very controversial.
(The only part being that the code is bugged even after removing the crash,
adding the benefit at two separate places in the code. This doesn't exactly make
the talent game-breakingly good though :))


Non-random artifact availability is an ancient bug, and fixing it alters
gameplay. However, it's unintentional and the bug was very obvious in the
randomization code.


Berserking should have been fixed, but requires significant work.


The uberjackal change was quite controversial, and I think some of it stems from
not knowing exactly what it does. If you play like you should do in the
unpatched version, killing less than about a thousand monsters of the same type,
there is absolutely no difference.

The patch simply stops the monsters from growing too powerful compared to the
original version. Monsters are capped at reaching around a hundred times more
hitpoints than the lvl 1 version first encountered. At the time it reaches this
patched-in cap, a jackal becomes much more tedious to kill than a dragon, while
the loot remains worthless in comparison. More to the point, repeatedly killing
the same kind of monster is not something you want to do on purpose even with
the patch.


I agree that fixing the 3-month corruption rate increases is something that
should have been done if it's a bug. I have not looked at that part of the code,
and I don't think I even knew that it was unintentional at the time. The patch
is almost 4 years old, and has not been changed since then.

Can you at least provide some sort of settings, so players can choose which
features of the patch they want to use, please.

This would have been easy to do, but it would make the problem with having
different variants much worse. The released patch contains the set of changes I
thought should be added. You may not agree, but I think it was an improvement.

However, having a player decide that he wants "randomized artifacts, stronger
wyrms, guaranteed aols in the pyramid, pink colored wererats" is not desirable.
Simply allowing my 4 changes to be toggled on/off independently would create 15
subtly different variants instead of one.

A pure bugfix patch might be beneficial, which changed the skilled crash, ingots
etc., but the bugs that can be easily fixed without making any decisions that
affect gameplay are pretty limited. It could still be valuable, but I didn't
make one.

- ToGu
.

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